Voice games have had a quiet history compared to mobile, console, and the PC gaming arena. However, Lightspeed and Microsoft’s M12 Ventures see Volley Games as a leader and game changer in the space, co-leading a $55M Series C on the backs of solid MAU and ARR.

Our host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, speaks with Max Child, CEO and Co-Founder of Volley, about the history of voice games, the current market, and the AI inflection point that enables experiences that were once hindered by slow speech recognition, difficulty in assessing intent, and the inability to interrupt an AI speaker. 

The duo dive into what’s in the Volley portfolio, how the games are performing, who is playing them, and how they are monetizing. We discuss the history of “input design” in games (controllers, mouse, keyboard, bespoke hardware) and why voice is one of the most powerful input mechanisms at the heart of human connectivity. That and more!

We’d also like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alexandra: All right. Hello? Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Naavik gaming podcast. I'm your host, Alex Takei, and this is interviews. So games have always spanned a litany of input design from mouse and keyboard to controllers, to touchscreens, to specific physical hardware design from the ground up to be a controller.

So think guitar hero or DDR, or honestly throwback to the late nineties. And for an early two thousands kids, like Bop it in game design 101, you can theoretically make anything an input control. An electronic cutting board and knife, for example, could be an input control for a video game. But today we're actually going to go a little bit more autovistic and back into the past.

And we're going to talk about one of man's first input controls, Our voice. Everyone here has probably played Marco Polo, but it's an example of one of the most primitive forms of call and response games, voice schemes have had a quiet history so far with very few mass identified games like song quiz.

And I've definitely yet to erupt on the scene as true breakout hit. However, that could be changing. Just like NVIDIA's graphics cards, super charged 3D storytelling, and better haptics and receiver feedback for motion capture enabled motion based input games, AI is powering voice and language models in a way that's getting my guest, who I'm about to introduce, really excited about the future of voice gaming.

And it's my pleasure to welcome on Max Child, CEO and co-founder of Volley. Max is cooler than being a fellow alumnus of Stanford GSB. He's a GSB dropout. AKA the biggest flex. He started Volley back in 2016. We chatted for a long time at a poker night at GDC and it got pretty inspired by what he's building.

So welcome to the air.

Max: Thank you. Excited to be here. That was the highlight of my life dropping out of GSB. So it's been all downhill from there.

Alexandra: No, truly. It is, it's the, it is the biggest flex. But I know that I just gave you a mini intro, but tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to found Volley and what Volley actually is.

Max: Yeah, absolutely. My co-founder James and I about 10 years ago like many people in sort of corporate jobs got disenchanted with the creativity we didn't feel like we were getting to build a product every day. And like many folks who go into gaming, I think what we always enjoyed building was games and entertainment.

 He quit his corporate job at the time in consulting. I dropped out of GSB as you noted, and we decided to teach ourselves to code. And we figured, Hey, if we could build this stuff ourselves, it would go a lot faster, we wouldn't have to find a mythical technical co-founder.

We could go be the technical co-founders ourselves. So I taught myself to be a mobile engineer. He taught himself to be a backend web engineer. And we started making mobile apps mostly games and entertainment for a while. And we built a trivia game we built. And we especially got obsessed with this idea of like natural language-based gaming.

And this was back in 2015, 2016, when that meant essentially chat based gaming or chat, chatbots it was the first wave of chatbots, which. Probably everyone has forgotten since chat GPT came out, but in 2015, 2016, a lot of people, us included got excited about the idea of texting as an interface for using computers.

And so we started building chat based games that you could play on your phone via text or Facebook messenger. We built a virtual pad, like a Tamagotchi type thing that you could text with. We built a couple more trivia ideas. We built some storytelling based games. And we were very fascinated by this idea of chat as an interface.

And we never got more than, I don't know, a couple thousand users. So it wasn't like setting the world on fire, but we thought it was cool as an interface. And we thought it was a novel approach to gaming and entertainment more generally. And then, the big moment, the kind of, Big turning point for the company was the introduction of Alexa and these sort of smart speaker AI platforms.

I got an Alexa for my birthday one year and James, my co founder, and I realized, Hey, we can actually code these games that we've built for chat for these voice based. Devices as well. And, the curve at the time for smart speakers was up and to the right, and we launched a couple of game ideas on that platform.

And like the third one. Got, I think like 5, 000 users in the first week or something with, no marketing, no, no spend, nothing. So we were like, okay, that's basically the most popular thing we've ever built on a platform that, nobody's paying any attention to. Like we should really double down on this and see where it goes.

And so we started launching more titles. We started getting smarter about voice and conversationally based interfaces and really I think getting better at building entertaining games within the limitations of that platform. And since then fast forwarding, the company has expanded a lot.

We have a lot more game titles. Most of our gameplay actually happens on screen devices today. So it happens on both Alexa devices with screens, these little kind of five to 10 inch screens that sit on your kitchen counter or, in your office or in your bedroom or something. And also on smart TVs which is actually the fastest growing part of the company where you can play our games on a Roku or a fire TV and It's a nice big screen experience and you still control it with your voice just by speaking into the microphone on the remote control.

Alexandra: Got it. I'm super excited to dive into all of that. Specifically, we're going to talk about the history of voice games in the current market. You gave us this little progression of Volley, but we're also going to max that out. Against what's been going on in the voice games market and talk about platforms and talk about where they're played.

But before we kick off I know that we've got a couple of exciting announcements to make that will help guide our discussion for today. And I'm not trying to steal your thunder here, but Molly has just announced that it's receiving a 55 million series C co led by Lightspeed and Microsoft.

So major congratulations. Yeah, that's huge.

Max: Yeah very. Definitely exciting been a lot of work and a great foundation for what we're trying to build going forward. Awesome.

Alexandra: And we'll be talking also about the strategic value there from the investor side as well at the later part of this episode.

But before that, I also know that you've got a game announcement.

Max: Yeah. I, in the spirit of You, you brought it back to the history of voice controlled interfaces and talking about Marco Polo somewhere between Marco Polo and today I think one of the great voice control games in history is you alluded to it, but I played a lot of rock bands on consoles back in the day.

And one of the fun parts of rock band is the sort of singing based interface where you can sing along to popular music and it tries to match the pitch of your voice. And you get points based on how accurate you're singing the song and I'm excited to announce that we're taking that idea and bringing that to a smart TVs, like Roku and fire TV.

And so we're launching a karaoke game this week where you can sing along to I think 30 popular songs today and do that pitch matching karaoke type experience. And in the next couple of months, we're going to add actually hundreds of additional tracks. And I think it's. It's a great, voice based experience.

It's pretty cool because we can actually offer something that you needed a console for, three, five, 10 years ago on these very kind of low underpowered smart TV devices today. And. It all works on the hardware that comes with your TV. So you can sing right into that remote control that, you get for free when you buy a new device.

So I think it's a lot of fun. We've been demoing it a lot in the office. It definitely helps if you have a couple of drinks beforehand, but not a necessary part of the experience. And we get to see who at Volley is the best at best at karaoke.

Alexandra: Yeah. I was about to say, it sounds like you're just bringing a bunch of karaoke bars into people's homes.

So I suspect that for everybody that has um, you don't even need to leave the house to to do karaoke night. So there'll be a lot of family singing. But that's awesome. So congratulations on those things. And I think that's a perfect segue to start talking about the history of voice games and the current market.

You're talking about your launch today, karaoke, you're seeing that as the ambition for an, of the new genre of the thing that you're targeting, but I'd love to kind of like rewind back the clock. You talked a little bit about what made you guys get into the business. You were super interested in this chat interface and you're super interested in like linguistics and the power of language to think.

Fuel inputs for games, but I would love for you to tell me a little bit about the history of voice video games. Maybe that are in volleys, right? My research, I found a game called shout to jump. Can you tell us a little bit more about like question of the day, which are some of the question of the day and shout to jump for our audience are some of the bigger voice schemes that have appeared on the scene.

Max: Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like historically voice games there's a couple of different eras, one is before speech recognition got good. And then there's when speech recognition got decent and you could start building more complex games around that. And then today we're moving in and I'm sure we'll talk more about speech recognition.

To this era where with large language models and the sort of advances in AI, you can really do amazing kind of speech based interfaces that change what we can do going forward. But going back to the era of maybe speech recognition isn't that good, but what's a fun voice based game? You mentioned shout to jump.

I think there's another one called like, Shout Ninja or something like that, but they're essentially platformer games or like endless runner combined with platformer games where they're side scrolling and you, the way you make your character jump, unlike in Mario, where press a button on your controller, you scream at your phone.

And it's, it's very viral as a sort of distribution angle for a game, because anyone who's playing. This game is by definition, like literally screaming at their phone. And so I, you can go on YouTube and you can see all these videos of gamers and influencers playing these games.

There was like a Jimmy Fallon bit where they had everyone play the game and so on. And still think that interface is pretty fun, actually. I think that there's like something there about just like how loud you shout being a control mechanism. But that's probably I don't know the first like very viral voice game.

I think it was huge in China. One of those variations of those where there was like a couple, there's tens of millions of downloads and, millions of DAU at one point or another. So I think the point of the history there is that there is really something primal about.

Using your voice or, shouting and using that as a method to play a game or just to interact with computers in general. I have a two year old daughter today and she talks better than she can do any other type of interaction with the world, right? She's not. She can't really play games on her iPad yet, but she can talk to her mom and I and tells us what to do quite a lot.

And so I think there's like a kind of like hierarchy of how intuitive and how sort of like, how base human instinctual different levels of interfaces are. And I think that voice is an interface or. Shouting in this case is like almost at the lowest level of like truly, evolutionarily the most instinctual way to communicate.

And so I think the shouting unlocked that to some degree. And then you mentioned fast forwarding to some of the more modern games, question of the day being one of the more popular games, which is essentially just a daily trivia game. It's wordle for trivia.

And. Again, it's based on very simple voice interface, multiple choice, A, B, C, D and ended up having millions and millions of users on Alexa and some other platforms. And we actually ended up acquiring question of the day. So that's actually part of the volley portfolio today.

But there is something. Even with a very basic type of game where the interface is very simple, there's still something joyful and natural about using your voice to control it. And I think that's what we've always believed at Volley from day one is that even if you take the same types of games that we've been playing for decades or even, whatever, centuries, in some cases, there, there is that emotional element of using your voice to control it.

That's very powerful. And I think, unlocked even more going forward with some of the modern large language model technologies.

Alexandra: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm just picturing someone sitting there with a basket of like lozenges, just screaming at their phone.

Max: I would need that. Yeah. But maybe it's like professional voice actors who can do.

Alexandra: Yeah. So we talked a little about shout to jump, which is on your phone and question of the day, which is a trivia game. Okay. Talk a little bit about in the past though the input is voice, what is the predominant platform as the receiver?

So let's think about car games. Voice games on a computer, voice games on a smartphone, now you mentioned earlier voice games on a smart TV where have these games been played in the past?

Max: Yeah, the interesting thing about voice games is, it's not so much about the device because, Almost any piece of hardware we have today has a microphone and a CPU and an internet connection.

What's actually really important for voice games is the, essentially the embarrassment factor of playing them in different contexts, right? Like mobile essentially unlock that, like that, the bus stop or the Starbucks line or the, the break time at work as the sort of like, Oh my God, there's all these like.

Unfilled voids in people's lives in which they could be playing, five to 10 minutes of a game. And, that's how candy crush and words with friends and everything, really took off. That sort of short session time throughout your day and voice is basically the opposite of that, where in like none of those contexts, would you want to play games or you want to shout at your games, right?

You don't really want to be at the bus stop or in the Starbucks line. Playing shout to jump or any voice game, really, you just look like a bit of a weirdo. But where voice games really make sense is essentially, at home and to some degree in the car. But I think, the average American spends whatever, eight to 10 hours a day at home.

And while. I'm sure a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are gamers and have consoles and such. A lot of folks don't, or they're just more casual gamers. Maybe their parents, maybe the only time they get to play games is through board games or family game night type experience.

Or if they all have their friends over to play a party game, once a month or something like that. And voice games really unlock. A lot of that sort of at home time as a more like casual gaming space. And you can do that. It can either be casual in the sense that, Hey I turn on my smart TV and I just want to play something a little like easier and lower friction to get started on then, loading up whatever, hardcore game I'm into on my console at that moment. And then there's also this sort of unused time around the home where people may not think of it as an opportunity to game, it could be like you're cooking or you're doing the dishes or something, and you want to play, one of our games is called song quiz, which is a guest to song game.

And you can play that in the background, like while you're cooking, like I've done that and you can do it on an Alexa device. And so I think like the insight for voice is that you can Both these sort of, I don't know, adjacent pieces of time that people are at home. And I think you can also unlock casual gaming at home in a way that has not happened yet because I think, most gaming at home is console or PC driven and tends to turn towards the sort of mid core hardcore player.

And, I love, A lot of those games myself, but I think there's a lot of casual gamers that, maybe are the sort of bingo or words with friends or candy crush player, but they don't really game at home at all other than on their phone. And we think there's a lot of new opportunities there with the low friction enabled by voice.

Alexandra: Got it. Yeah. And I guess we talked a little bit about the challenges you mentioned. It's actually less about the receiver platform, where can you play it where it's quiet? I suppose it would be challenging to play shout to jump on the subway.

Max: Um, it doesn't even have to be quiet.

Like it could be loud at your house and you can play the game, but it has to be not embarrassing. It has to be not, there's that social pressure to not seem like a crazy person. And the home. Enables that ability to talk to computing devices more broadly.

Alexandra: Gotcha. Have there been any other challenges besides maybe that level of embarrassment where you play in the past for voice?

Max: There's a ton of technical challenges that are just starting to get solved. I would say speech recognition quality is still something that, is improving. I think that the best in class models today are like Gemini Ultra from Google, which is still only a, it's a 95 percent accuracy rate on transcription.

So you're getting 5 percent wrong, or, one out of 20 words you're transcribing wrong. It'd be like if you're playing a console game and like, you know, one out of 20 times you press the a button or whatever, and it just doesn't click, I can be like, this game sucks.

And so like voices is a little bit like that, where like one out of 20 times in a best case scenario, clicking the sort of standard interface or using the standard interface is not going to work. You can improve that with. Context you can tell the model, Hey, like I'm listening for, in a trivia context, ABCD or in karaoke, I'm listening for musical notes or, and so you can improve that from 95 to, 96, 97, 98 or whatever.

But, if you touch something on your phone and it just didn't respond, you get frustrated pretty quickly, even at a couple percent error rate. And so that's one of the core issues with speech recognition. Thankfully, the modern era of the sort of, new software, new hardware is really improving fast there.

It's really improving fast, which is exciting. And then, another big issue is If even if you do recognize what the person's saying, people say things in all different kinds of ways. You can phrase even a standard request, like you turn on the lights or something, in a thousand different ways or thousands of different ways, and that's always been one of the core challenges of natural language processing is figuring out.

What's the thousand different ways that people can say the same idea and how do I actually pull the intent out of what they're saying? And that's getting closer to a solved problem, especially with large language models, where they're pretty good at pulling what you mean out of that thousand different ways you could say that same phrase.

And then there's like the kind of game design questions that are really interesting, which is like, how do you. How do you make something interesting, but still like on rails to some degree, right? Because you want to guide people to what they can say to the game. Like you don't want them to be able to ask any question, you don't want them to be able to ask you about politics or news or sports in the middle of your, your music game, for example.

And so how do you guide people to like what they can say? Making it interesting and fun, but also like clear enough that they say something that we're expecting and that the model is ready for. And that's always, that, that's a central game design challenge on any platform, right? Like how do you allow for some level of exploration and creativity and user generated experience without, just letting them do literally anything in the game.

Although, some of the more modern Zelda games, it feels like you can almost do anything, right? But I think those are all challenges. Luckily, I think for certain types of audiences, the value of being able to use voices, the control mechanism is 10 times better than using touch or using a controller.

And so you can overcome some of those issues by just Making it really low friction, making it really social and making it just super intuitive to play for kind of all ages, which is quite different than other game categories.

Alexandra: All right. Awesome. So those are definitely a great summary of some of the challenges around, where people play, speech recognition, determining intention.

But obviously you think, and obviously Microsoft and LVSP. Also thinks that those headwinds are going to get mitigated by something. And one of those things that we alluded to this in our intro is the advancements in AI and open AI announced their voice advancements in May, 2024, that you seem pretty excited about.

Can you give us the one on one here? Like what's the rundown of what was said and what's the inflection point going to be for voice here? Why is this important to voice games?

Max: Yeah, I would say, we sort of alluded in, in that last discussion of some of the core issues with voice interfaces and to sort of move away from gaming.

I think like the biggest issues with voice interfaces have always been, we talked about recognition quality, does it understand what you want to do? Speed is another one that I didn't really talk about, but that is a huge problem because if I say something to a game or my phone or smart TV or whatever, and it takes five seconds, every time I say something, To round trip and respond to me.

It's just a really frustrating experience. When you and I are talking, there's probably a, a couple of tens of a second behind between each other, or maybe there's a, we can often interrupt each other. We can actually talk over each other. And it just feels very unnatural if you have a very slow voice interface.

And then the last piece is like. can it do stuff that I care about? Even if it does understand what I'm saying, can it do enough of that? And OpenAI announced their new model, chat gbt 4. 0. The O stands for, I think, Omni model. Which is maybe not very catchy, but it essentially means that, Instead of the previous version of chat dbt, where it's text in text out, you type in a box and text comes out of the box, right?

The omni model element means it's not just text into the model. It's also audio into the model. And it's also video or pictures into the model. And on the other side of what the model spits out. And then, it's not just text anymore, but it can also be audio, i. e. speech or music in some cases that sound effects, so on.

And it can also spit out visuals, whether that's AI generated art or something that requires a picture and response, that kind of thing. And the biggest kind of technological leap forward is they. Essentially actually trained the model on these different types of inputs and outputs rather than previous models, which were always just trained on text in and text out.

And in, what that means is essentially what was previously a three step process, which is take the audio, turn it to text, run the text through the large language model, and then synthesize some sort of audio output, three step process. Maybe each of those takes a half second. It's a one and a half second response.

Now they combine them all into one step. They trained it on audio in and it can produce audio out natively. So maybe the whole thing is a half second. It's literally three times as fast, maybe even five times as fast and core use cases. So if you get it down to, 0. 2, seconds of latency, you start being able to have a really natural conversation with the sort of voice interface.

I'm sure you saw their like, somewhat maligned, like Scarlett Johansson esque, herd demos. Before there was a big froufrou about whether or not they took Scarlett Johansson's voice, it was a pretty cool demo. It speaks very quickly, you can actually interrupt it in a fairly natural way, which is pretty cool.

Pretty revolutionary for voice based models. Being able to talk over them, very different from Alexa or Siri today where you have to wait essentially, or say Alexa or Siri. And so you can start really having this very natural conversation with the computer. And then the large language models are also improving a lot.

So they can just do a lot more stuff for you. I can ask them to carry out increasingly complex tasks and they can carry them out. And I think they say like GPT 4 is like a. Smart college student and GPT 5 is going to be a PhD student or something. So that change where voice interfaces are now under a half second and you can interrupt with them in addition to the models, just getting smarter and smarter, I think is.

Like kind of an iPhone ish moment where all of a sudden like touchscreens started working I'm sure you remember roughly similar ages, but like going to the ATM machine and like trying to like tap in your pin on a touchscreen and like 1997, it was like really slow or like, but all of a sudden you got an iPhone and you're like, Oh my God, touchscreens are amazing.

They actually work. And I think we hit that turning point with the recent open AI announcements where all of a sudden like, Oh, instead of the sort of like Poking at the thing and waiting now, it just, you talk and it works naturally. And we're very early on that process.

It got announced literally a month ago, but I think that. You're starting to see the early kind of signs of the downstream impact of that. Apple just announced that, they're redoing Siri and all these various iPhone AI features all built around those kinds of models where, Hey, like I say something and Siri actually does it correctly and in under half a second, right.

Which is 10 times better than current Siri, or maybe a hundred times better than current Siri. Siri has gotten a lot of crap. Justifiably. But if series, 10 times faster and a hundred times better at doing what you ask it to do, you can see a world in which people are using Siri.

A heck of a lot more. And I think that's we're on the cusp of that happening, right now as it's starting to get rolled out into these devices.

Alexandra: Yeah. I, as someone who always turns Siri off I'm waiting for Siri to be a little bit better, but I find this pretty interesting, right?

Because and we talked about this a little bit in our kickoff because. Sometimes adoption is hindered by the inability to make an experience of high fidelity due to those technical limitations. I remember of course, the original motion sensor games that were cool in theory, but flopped on the input side, given the fact that the motion to input translation kind of sucked.

So it didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. The connect for Xbox, as well as if anybody remembers the eye toy for Sony. I remember trying to being super excited to play the PS2 eye toy skate game anti grav huge throwback for anybody, but it was just basically a disaster, right? Like it was so much more of a novelty, right?

And fast forward a couple of years, the Wii explodes because someone at Nintendo figures out that motion is best if there's a hardware receiver in someone's hand. And I think it's interesting that we talk about those things because with voice, you're gonna, you're gonna be super charged by these advancements that will allow you to create that compelling experience.

Max: Yeah, I think, I, yeah, I think the whole history of technology is like, usually someone has a reasonably good idea. 10 to 20 years early, but the execution is mediocre. And so everyone thinks the idea is fundamentally bad. And then, 10 to 15 years later with like correct execution, the idea like changes the world.

You could take the Apple Newton, from the nineties, essentially being a prototype of the iPhone in many ways. And everyone thought the Newton sucked. It was like a huge flop. They fired the CEO and all this stuff, but like, you know, I think I, I, I mean, obviously I'm, talking my own book here.

Use your own judgment, but I think that we're. We're really at that moment where, just the pure quality of speech recognition has gotten, 10, 20 times better in the last five years. And then the ability of the computers to do the stuff that you want them to do with voice interfaces has gotten.

Like a hundred times better, a thousand times better with large language models. So it's just hard to see that combination isn't the kind of beginning of a turning point for speech driven interfaces in general. And the last point I would make here is that we're talking right now because it is in the end, the most natural way to do things.

The average person talks like three times faster than they type. I think myself included. And so if you could just, even if you could just type three times faster, By talking like a lot of people would do that. You'd see a lot more of those phone booths that are soundproof and offices, because all of a sudden I can like interface with the computer three times faster.

So that's. It's hard to see a world in which when voice starts working, that it doesn't take over quite a lot of the way as we use computers and gaming.

Alexandra: Yeah. And I think the other interesting call out here is when you think about the equivalent install base about what voice games would be, you're not talking about PlayStation fives or high end gaming rigs, but you're talking about Alexa's cars, home audio systems, like Sonos or smart TVs.

And Amazon has sold over 500 million Alexa's enabled devices. And in the U S approximately 60 to 70 percent of U S households. Own and use a smart TV for streaming, according to my research. But yeah, that's an interesting kind of proposition in the sense that like you're, you have a very high IB to tackle with this kind of game genre, right?

Max: Yeah. Yeah. Smart TV is I think it's, it depends what research you look at it, but there might be more smart TVs in the U S than there are smartphones, or at least it's like close, like they're in the universe of each other, which is sort of mind blowing and the other thing that sort of blows people minds who work in technology is that the average American watches like between four and five hours of tv a day and they also game for you know Another 45 minutes to an hour on average and so the average american spending like five to six hours in front of a television per day or at least the tv is on creating some kind of entertainment experience for them five to six hours a day.

And so You know, it is still the most important entertainment device in most people's lives. And even if you're like, hey okay, of those five hours that are just watching TV, maybe 30 minutes of that could be, casual gaming. And obviously I believe that, voice enables a new type of casual gaming.

That's just such a massive entertainment market compared to, a lot of things where you're ending up on a, just a device that most people don't have yet. Or, you're relying on hardware that maybe five to 10 years from now, you're hoping people will have I think VR would be like a canonical example of that.

Whereas 60, 70 people already have a smart TV. Essentially, every new smart TV is every new TV is a smart TV, right? And so you're going to see it, 80, 90, 100 percent in a few more years.

Alexandra: Got it. All right. I think this is also an excellent segue to start talking about volley and volley's portfolio and what it's building.

And then again, after that shifting to the business of voice but let's start talking about Bali. Okay. So you just sure about to release this karaoke game. You mentioned that you acquired Song Quiz what's kind of our question of the day, sorry. What is, what does the Volley portfolio consists of today?

Max: Yeah, I would say there's like three categories of games that have been working really well for Volley. And it's been pretty consistent over the last, four or five years, even though the quality of those games, I think, has improved a lot in that time frame. One is, trivia driven games so that would be, your question of the day, which, is what it sounds like, but it's, wordle for trivia.

It's, you get one trivia question per day, or you get a couple more if you want it and it's a morning coffee routine, we also have kind of IP game show trivia games. So we have jeopardy and wheel of fortune. So you can play jeopardy on your smart TV. It's pretty cool because we can put up the big board, like you're actually on the game show jeopardy.

And, you can, use your remote as your buzzer and you can call out the questions like you're on the show, you can be like, give me us capitals for 600, and then you'd be like, what is Sacramento? And so you can use the voice remote to naturally participate in that Jeopardy experience.

And we also build multiplayer which is pretty cool because you can compete against your friends and you can all like, see who's the best at Jeopardy which I think is a super fun experience if you're a trivia nerd. If you're not a trivia nerd, Jeopardy! is an incredibly difficult game, actually.

Because we have real questions from the show. Because we we license the IP there. So we have actual questions. And Jeopardy! is pretty hard, actually, it turns out. So there's, the trivia category is one category. Another category is music, as we were talking about. Releasing this karaoke game, which we're excited about.

We also have our music guessing game, where we play pop music and you guess the title of the artist, you hear Britney Spears or whatever, you just shout out the answer to that. And that's a super fun kind of classic party game, family game at experience. And then the last one that's always been fun and interesting and is getting more so with LLMs is storytelling and character driven games.

We built a number of kind of choose your own adventure kind of interactive fiction based games. We built. A medieval kind of castle management simulation, one called yes, sire, where you're like running a medieval fiefdom and you make choices and it impacts your influence and wealth and so on. And it you get to pretend you're, yeah, I guess a feudal Lord and see how long you can survive running a castle.

And. We're working on a couple other sort of storytelling driven experiences around large language models. So we're working on a kind of virtual pet Tamagotchi game, going back to the roots of Volley, where, you adopt a little pet and you can talk to it and given that it's all powered by a large language model, you can actually build like a real bond with it.

It feels like an actual. Yeah, it feels like an actual persona in your life or like a character in your life in a meaningful way, which I'm pretty excited about. And I think with, I think one of the big use cases of large language models for gaming is creating these relationships with real characters.

And I think that voice and conversation as an interface for that is the most natural way to do it because it's largely how we build relationships in real life.

Alexandra: Yeah, makes sense. Sounds like there's a lot going on in there. There's a lot of games. And so before I want to talk about how much, how you guys have been building those games and how big your team is.

I'm curious, like how many players are there across all of these titles and is there a significant overlap in player base amongst all the voice titles or yeah, what's the MAU looking like for the volley portfolio?

Max: Yeah it's seasonal, but we're typically around four to 5 million in monthly active users.

It's a little bit higher around like Christmas time. Cause like everybody, everybody's cold on the East coast and they're like playing, playing games in their home and they're, at home with their families. But yeah, that's basically the range and pretty consistent and pretty good growth over the last few years.

And, over the lifetime of volley, I think we've had, I don't know, 20 to 30 million people try out the games over the last five years that we've been building. So it's uh, yeah it's pretty substantial. I mean, Yeah, like it's definitely an, a corner of gaming where. Basically, some, I think a lot of people don't think it exists at all.

And then, we see the data and we're like, eh I don't know 10 percent of us households have played a volley game at some point or so, 10 to 15 percent or something like that. So yeah I still think there's a lot of room to grow and recapture those folks with new and better experiences as well.

Alexandra: Got it. If I could double click on, like the mystery of people don't think that this is like these games exist Who are these people? Could you just describe maybe some mortal types or like some demos of who they are?

Max: Like they're normal Americans. Yeah, I think demographically I think demographically we, we like to say it's like millennial parents is probably like the core demo where it's 30 and 40s parents with kids you Representation of having children, homeowners playing at home, that kind of thing.

I think like a little more Midwestern, maybe a little less like coastal techies or whatever. And yeah, it does tend to overlap with that casual audience where maybe the only game they've ever played is like. Words with friends or something. But, you know, they play tons of words with friends and, they also play song quiz or jeopardy or, hopefully karaoke at some point.

So yeah, I think it's again, the average American watches like five to six hours of TV a day. Like. How many hours of TV a day do you watch?

Alexandra: I don't know, maybe like one or two, like one is busy. Yeah,

Max: I think I'm, I think I'm, I think I'm under one now because I had a, I had a daughter two years ago and I just don't have a lot of free time.

So I think you, sometimes you have to look introspectively and be like, Oh, actually I'm like a weirdo, like statistically speaking, right? Like I watch under one hour TV a day, like I'm way off the left side of the bell curve, like in terms of the sort of average American experience.

And I think that our audience is sort of normal folks who go to work and come home and want to just like mess around for a few hours play a game on their TV or play a game on their Alexa or, bond with their kids or, learn something in a trivia game, that kind of thing.

I just think there's this big, like iceberg of sort of casual game audiences that are frequently like beneath the surface for folks who Work really hard and have jobs that they, spend all day on every day and that kind of thing.

Alexandra: Yeah, it makes sense.

 So this is, we learned a little bit about your audience. We know that a lot of your games have that visual feedback system. They're getting played like on smart TVs predominantly and on smartphones. I would love to start switching over to the business of voice and the way that I want to start with this is before we go to like monetization, retention, discovery you just told me about a bunch of games that you guys have built.

Sure. How big is your team? How much does it take? How long does it take to make one of these games? What's the dev team side per game on average?

Max: Yeah. One point I would make before I get into that is that, the vision for Volley, and I probably should have said this upfront is to sort of build one homepage where you can play all of our games.

So we want to be, the Netflix homepage for casual games, right? We want to be the box on your smart TV, that is next to all the other boxes that play video. And, we want our box to mean, Hey, it's like casual, family friendly, low friction gaming. So we have these games.

It's not like we have, six, seven, eight different games and they're all different apps and you have to switch between them constantly. And you have to discover them all individually and you have to remember where they are. And from our perspective, we would have to market them all and so on. We have, one app, the volley app, and all of our games are in that app, right?

So every time we launched a new title. We like launch it into that app. And we have a kind of different approach, I think from development and perspective and timing and so on. Overall we're about 75 people today. And it probably takes six to nine months to launch a new title.

It often depends like. How ambitious you want to be on like single versus multiplayer. If you want to have those all working on day one it depends on, sometimes we can build more kind of mini game experiences as an experiment, or, sometimes we have a more full fledged ambitious product.

But yeah, I think, yeah, six to nine months is probably the ballpark range and it probably takes a team of five to seven people to build a game. And. And then, the blessing and the curse, and I'm sure you hear this from a lot of game developers is you have to decide are we going to do live ops?

Are we going to keep adding features? Are we going to keep are we going to try to host events? Are we going to add new monetization systems? Are we going to add metagame progression stuff? When do you stop? If you launch a game in nine months, does everyone like.

Do high fives and move on to the next thing. Or do you like spend the next four years trying to make that game better? And I think that's something we do not have a clear answer to, but I think it's just very, It depends on what you're seeing in terms of the metrics and uptake and how excited people are and also just how excited we are internally about what the feature roadmap would be and yeah, we'll just also like our pair we like, Oh man, if we could just do this in this game it would be 10 times cooler.

How pumped are we about that? It's because there's definitely an art and a science to all this.

Alexandra: Got it. Yeah. And I think that's a critical distinction because I think one of the things that I was going to ask about is, how has Volley built discovery for its titles? Like I imagine it's fairly challenging without a voice specific game store.

But it sounds like you're building the app where the store you're building the store. And the games inside the store and that app basically exists on Roku's, Alexa's phones, etc. Fire TV,

Alexandra: Fire TV, okay, got it.

Max: Yeah, exactly. And discovery has look, it's always challenging to drive discovery.

I'm sure you guys talk about it all the time. And, I've read a bunch of your articles about discovery and mobile and so on. I think that like the interesting thing is, in the end, discovery is all just about unit economics. And I, and can get in front of customers in a sort of economic way, given, how much you expect to sort of, uh, monetize based on that.

And I think. We've actually found that I think because our games are very broadly appealing and broadly targeted they may not have that depth of gameplay and monetization that, a more, polished mid core hardcore game might have something like Jeopardy is just not as deep as, destiny or whatever.

But because it's broadly appealing and a huge audience, knows what Jeopardy is, or they like know that guess the song games are fun, or hopefully that they think, karaoke game sounds like a fun idea. We find that like getting in front of users on a number of different marketing platforms works pretty well.

Like we've been pretty successful doing on platform marketing, where we buy little ads on the homepage of your Roku saying, Hey go check out jeopardy or whatever. That works pretty well for us. We found social media marketing works pretty well for us, especially if there's like a video component where people can watch someone playing the game and they're like, Hey, that looks like pretty fun.

I should go find that on my fire TV or whatever. So we found that not that it's easy to do user acquisition. Obviously, there's always challenges, but I think that. We thankfully kind of like leapfrogged the like hyper targeted, like app tracking trans pre app tracking transparency super deep whale hunting kind of monetization era.

And we sort of just started with like very broad titles, we monetize with a subscription, which is obviously like a sort of, lower lifetime value for hardcore players, but is also pretty good for broader monetization and kind of makes sense on a TV. And so we found that like. probably by luck because we never got smart at all the stuff that everybody got smart at in 2000, 15 around mobile marketing and so on, we kind of like leapfrogged a little bit of that hangover period post app tracking transparency and also just mobile.

Not growing as fast anymore.

Alexandra: And also owning the IPS is something like jeopardy or having a licensing partnership with something like jeopardy. You're actually, yes, you're actually totally right. You skipped the UA gold mine and because you didn't do it and now you're actually on the clear on the other side, right?

Max: Yeah. We never. Yeah, we never got addicted to like how awesome mobile gaming as a business was in like the mid 2010s. And I know people who did, and a lot of them did really well. So I think they're quite happy with their decision making process, but basically by pure luck or maybe just lack of skill, like we skipped the whole era where people were getting really smart at hyper targeted, mobile game marketing.

And we never got smart at it. So we're like more in the kind of it's I don't know, we're in the like broadcast, TV era where we're trying to be like, NBC or something and like, you know, family friendly and everyone can play together and they're very, broad, like sitcom type experience rather than these sort of like super niche, super targeted, focused audience games, which is, I think where a lot of the industry was, five years ago.

Alexandra: And you mentioned subscription. So right now I understand that you're saying that Volley's whole app is a subscription based model or each game individually is a subscription based model?

Max: The former. Yeah. So you subscribe to the app and you get all the stuff for that subscription. I think it aligns with like what people's expectations are on these devices.

Again, I think like every other app on your TV is essentially one subscription to get all the stuff in the app. So I think it makes sense to people. And yeah, and we've just found historically make sense to the customers. We can also keep adding games to that portfolio. And so we can keep adding kind of value to the subscription and aiming to improve retention and usage over time by just adding games and making the games better and deeper.

And I don't think we've. We have not as yet hit like an issue where we're like, Oh we can't capture these crazy whale customers. And so the business model doesn't work. Now, maybe two years from now, we'll find that and we'll have to rethink it. But right now subscription is I think what our customers expect on these devices and also aligns with the types of games we want to make and makes it very easy because you just have to.

Monetize someone one, convince them to subscribe one time. And you don't have to constantly be thinking about how am I going to, selling out purchases, 9, 000 times to people throughout the game.

Alexandra: Yeah. I'm curious actually, like what does your, what does the retention look like?

I presume that if subscription is the model that you've chose for the volley portfolio, I'm not sure if that's the way it always has been in the past that it must be working.

Max: Yeah. I'm not going to tell you like the exact number on that, But I would say we comp pretty well with we look at other consumer subscriptions, as a sort of comp. There's entertainment ones. You look at, I don't know, the Hulus and the, Apple TV pluses of the world. We're definitely not as good as Netflix. Like Netflix is the best, they're, they also spend 10 billion a year. So if we like, Could spend 10 billion a year on content.

I think we'd have better retention. So just stay tuned. But yeah, I think we're in the category of a decent streaming service, and then also if you look at things like, I don't know, outside of gaming, if you look at a duo lingo, or if you look at a, meditation, calm and headspace and stuff, I think we're in those categories where, I think we're a little better than some of those.

But we can't pretty well to like. yeah, I mean, Duolingo is an interesting one. We conned pretty well to Duolingo and they're like a 20 billion public company. So we feel like there's a fair amount of room to grow there.

Alexandra: Got it. And yeah, again, like your time, speed for development is super fast.

The cost to make games is seemingly cheap and subscription model works when you can pump out content. Fast. Yeah. And cheap. It makes sense. But I'm curious, you mentioned the whales, right? And Sure. I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit pie in the sky about how you see the monetization framework evolving for voice.

I'd imagine it's challenging because in a place where there's a lot more visual peel there's skins and battle passes. It seems a little weird to be purchasing a battle pass for a voice game, but maybe that's something that you just thought about. But, one of the things I thought was really interesting was the adoption of voice ads in games.

And have you guys thought about that kind of top end monetization outside of the sub? Maybe on top of the sub? For the Volley portfolio?

Max: Yeah. I think we thought about it. I don't think we have an answer to like what the, The right idea is there. We'll probably do some experiments over the next couple of years.

I think that I dispute the idea that you couldn't sell like skins or a battle pass through voice. Like I, I basically think that anything you could sell through clicks of a button, like you could sell through voice because we could build, three years from now, we could have a, as visually robust a game as a fortnight or something like that, right?

So there's no. There's no reason you couldn't have a, an Unreal Engine visual game, where you're selling cosmetics or, currency or battle pass or whatever, where voice is the core interface. Now, maybe that's not what people are used to. Ripping off Fortnite and making it a voice game is probably fundamentally a bad idea, but there's there's no like first principles reason you can't like, Sell people things with voice, right?

It's just, if those things are appealing enough, right? You can, I dunno, walk down the street in a bazaar and people are selling you stuff with their voice all the time and that, that seems to work okay, I go to the convenience store, people sell me stuff with the voice, it seems to be fine.

So the question is can you create things that people want to buy and can you create an economy and, a currency or just, cosmetics or upgrades or whatever it is that sort of progression and so on that lends itself to an in app purchase driven monetization system. I think that Rightfully modern gamers have pretty high expectations for, like, how cool the stuff is gonna be that they can buy within app purchases and how good it looks and, how it makes them feel or how it helps them progress in the game.

And for us, I think it's just about building. More ambitious titles that have a kind of world model that lends itself to more complex or more compelling in our purchase based scheme. I think, no guarantees that we'll do this, but I talked about, our virtual pet game, and I think you could see a world in which You build a really ambitious virtual pet game in which there's, outfits for your pet, and there's, dog collars, and there's they can go on trips, and they can go on playdates, and you can buy them fancy food, and all this stuff, and like, I'm not saying this is a good idea specifically, but you could see a world in which you could make those things sufficiently compelling to do purchase based model, on top of the sub, or I don't know, maybe it's a standalone thing where you can just start, make it truly free to play.

TBD, I think, but my general world model is that like, if you make the economy and the universe that the person is living in interesting enough where they want to buy cosmetics or something else in the game that they'll do it. And I don't think voice really makes a big difference versus other ways of buying things.

And then on the ad side, I think. I think the key insight from ads is you have to show a lot of ads to make money. And I, I don't do a lot of listening in this case. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, there aren't a lot of great ads based businesses. First of all Putting aside my own aesthetic distaste for a lot of ads, which I'm sure everyone shares where they're like, I like, there's just a lot of crappy ads out there, which I think is fair.

Even if you're like, okay, these are all going to be great, really, good ads, highly targeted. I actually want the products and so on. Like the ads businesses that are really big are like, Facebook and Google where, you literally have Billions of daily active users, right?

And you have a hyper targeted ad system even in gaming. And look, more about the industry that I do, I don't think the, I probably the most successful ad driven companies are these hyper casual companies or, like a voodoo or something like that. And even then there's like. Feels like there's a ceiling there where there's a difference between how far you can get as voodoo versus how far you could get as, as Fortnite or something like that. I just think that it's really hard to make the math work on ads.

Alexandra: And it's definitely a bit more like complimentary part of the revenue mix, like completely different, like CPM model.

But again, it isn't someone literally could just go buy 2000 to 3000 worth of, Gatcha cards. And it's right.

Max: And the number of ad impressions you would have to show, to, to. You'd probably have to show, I think like a, 200, 000 ad impressions to essentially pay off, 2000 of gotcha cards or whatever.

You know, either you have 200, you show them all one ad just to pay one person's purchase. Or you show one, one person, I don't know, 20, 000 hats. The right gem bundle and you're good.

Alexandra: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Okay. Yeah. I'm just was super curious to think about how you're thinking about the top end monetization there.

And so before we cause I want to close out on asking some questions about the investment. Sure. I did have a question about Whether or not there are any concerns with the voices that you use to power these games. Where are the voices coming from, and are they potentially subject to some of the backlash that, a studio like Embracer face from using AI voices in their AAA shooter?

Is that, do you think the same dynamic is going to be present for Volley, or?

Max: That's an interesting question. I would say today we're using a pretty narrow set of voices that are like, they're the AWS voices or they're the Google voices or they're the Microsoft Azure voices or whatever, we we have started experimenting with using synthesized voices based on voice acting, but it's always someone we're working with where that's You know, they know that's the deal.

We say, Hey, we're going to record some audio for, a few hours in the studio and we're going to pay you X, Y, Z, and, we're going to be able to synthesize a game show host, voice based on that got it. Okay. Yeah. My. My intuition is that if you're up front with people about what the deal is and they feel like they're being fairly compensated for their work even if you're synthesizing some of what they say in the game, that my intuition is that if you're up front about that, then some people won't want to do it, but some people will want to do it, and, you won't hopefully have a huge issue.

I do think there's a more interesting question around like whatever deep fakes and scraping audio and or reusing, voice actors and then synthesizing based on it without their consent, which is something we don't do and we don't intend to do. But I think it's, it'll be. It's going to be a big part of the future.

I think these discussions, not just with voice, but I think with Hollywood in general about if whatever if George Clooney doesn't want to do another Costa Migos ad is, does he just, okay. Them like synthesizing a version of George Clooney to like, to do the Costa Migos ad obviously if you do it without asking that's, I think illegal.

If it's definitely unethical and I think illegal. But. Is the future a lot of marketing is synthesized versions of a famous people or famous voices, that kind of thing.

Alexandra: Yeah.

Max: I have to imagine. Yes, because I think that a people are like lazy and they're like, great. Now I don't have to do the work and I just get paid.

And then B there is still a lot of power and celebrity. And then C I think. AI really enables personalization in a meaningful way where you can make, in this case, an ad, but in our case, a game can be very personal based on what you've done to date. In that virtual pet example, you're building the relationship with the pet and they're talking to you based on your history and their memories with you and so on.

And so the future just feels very personalized to me because AI enables generated content in all these areas that we didn't have it before.

Alexandra: Got it. Yeah. I found it. I'm one of those, I think it's supposed to be interesting. Interesting. I think that stuff is also like probably covered under like name and likeness.

And so it's copyright and stuff, but you talked a little bit about this medieval fantasy role playing game. I suppose it would be much more immersive if the voice was not Siri.

Max: Yes, the voice is not, the voice is not Siri in that game for the record, but it is like a. Fully licensed, yeah,

Alexandra: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. All right. so in our final topic, I want to talk a little bit about the strategic staying power of voice games. And I think the core question comes from this. We talked about like the audience and what they're doing and how old they are and where they live, but in general, the home is a place where that really competes for attention.

I could go play with my, I could go play my other video game. I could just play candy crush on my phone. I could talk to my partner. I could talk to my kids. I could play with my dog in the car. You're competing with podcasts, music, just general conversations. You've obviously got a great team, a great product idea.

And I'm going to ask what do your investors see in, in this situation to de risk that kind of component of the home is a competitive place for attention. Um, you know, I mean,

Max: Um, you know, I mean, I don't know, there's like an art and a science to all these things. I think like the science answer, which is not very persuasive is Hey, look, we have, 5 million monthly active users and like retention looks pretty solid.

So you're like, okay, there's something here, right? You don't have to think too much. You're just like, okay, the numbers look fine. And like the, the revenue chart seems like it keeps going up. So like, you know, all good. Right. Um, But I think more interesting is the sort of art side of the question that you're asking.

Again, just come back to, I think that we have a lot of evidence that casual gaming is this huge opportunity. It's the majority of mobile revenue today. And, 10, 12 years ago, nobody thought like casual gaming was even a market. I played Bejeweled in the browser and there was like no monetization, right?

And then Candy Crush ended up being like, arguably like the most successful game of all time in some sense, right? So I just think very strongly that, Okay. I have a console, I play console games at home. We obviously have evidence that people like to game at home. We have evidence that they like to game on TVs, but I think this audience that drives literally the majority of revenue on mobile, doesn't game at home and what they do at home is, they watch TV essentially.

Or they do a million of those other things you were describing, but. I focus on the TV thing because that four or five hours is just so much entertainment time where you're like, there's definitively demand for entertainment in that period. And I think there's room for more, interactive entertainment, more Joyful, engaging experiences out of those four to five hours rather than just watching TV.

And I, and in the end, I'm super biased, but I think our games are fundamentally more compelling than just like sitting by yourself playing candy crush, which often feels like a little bit like a sort of Skinner box experience where you're just like, you just completely turn your brain off.

Like we, our games are a little more engaging. They're a little more active. It, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a trivia genius to play our games, but like you're playing karaoke, like that's a pretty active experience. And so I think there's just a lot of unexplored territory for casual gaming in the home.

And I think that what we've been missing today was the control mechanism or the interface to, to enable that. And I think that, the, we, I think you mentioned was a great example of where they really found that sweet spot of Oh, there's all these casual games that people want to play if you make the interface simple enough.

And I think that voice as an interface, could maybe be seen as like a spiritual successor to that, which is actually there's a ton of people who want to play casual games on their TVs, but. They don't want to learn how to use a controller for every single title. Or just at all. And and I think one final like point on this front is that our games are, have a very broad age range.

We talked about the core demo, but like, you know, five year olds can like literally play our games. Whereas like they probably can't play a console game and 90 plus year olds can literally play our games. Because the interface is. This thing that humans can just do and so whether or not we're capturing time from other areas of people's lives, which I still think we could do.

There's also people who just literally can't play games like, at home using a console. And so there's also that sort of unexplored territory of, gaming time that maybe people will. Would get a lot of value out of, but that they can't do it right now. TBD, we can talk in three, five years, see if we're right or not, but I just think that like, yeah, it just seems very straightforward to me that there's this huge casual game gap at home and that.

A simpler, lower friction interface is what it takes to enable that.

Alexandra: Yeah. I think that's a very inspiring note to end, but end on you're obviously believe in it's a beautiful growing casual market, but also I think the messaging around like, yeah, building for an older demo that no longer can click super fast or even drag on touchscreens and Five year olds who can say only like a couple of words, but they can still play.

Is it actually a really interesting and beautiful future. And so Max, it was incredibly awesome to have you. Uh, We're unfortunately out of time, but I'm going to ask you just a really quick closing question. Do you regret?

Max: Not at all. I do not regret it at all. My mom, you should have to ask her.

She might regret it, but I think it's so fun that we both get to work in a creative field. And obviously like you made it work while going through all of business school, but I, at that time felt existentially, like I needed to like change my life path and start actually building things myself.

And I felt I had to learn to code to do that. And whether I was right or wrong or not, I don't know. It seems like it turned out okay in the end, or I'm enjoying my work and I enjoy building these games. And I think the company is really fun to work at. And I don't know. I, yeah, in the end, like you sort of have to like, think about what you like doing and what you get up excited to work on every day.

And for me, and I think my co founder James, that was like building creative, new entertainment that. Makes people's lives a little bit more fun and also taking advantage of these new technologies that we think are really cool. No, no regrets.

Alexandra: It's been super fun. Yeah, that's a, that's fantastic.

I think everybody finds their success in their own way. But that's our show guys. Max, thank you so much for coming on. If anybody in our audience wants to reach out for you, reach out to you or check out Bali, what's the best way to do that?

Max: Yeah, our URL is volleygames.com. So pretty intuitive.

And I'm max at. That URL. So feel free to email me there. Or you can find me on Twitter. I don't know, Google, whatever. It's all pretty easy, but um, yeah excited to chat with anyone who's interested in the space and thank you so much for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it.

Alexandra: Of course. Yeah. And thank, and again, congratulations on your big news. We'll be really looking forward to. Potentially singing in my house, but yeah.

Max: Yeah, I'm going to send it over. I want to get some video and we'll use that in an ad maybe.

Alexandra: But as, as always friends, if you've got feedback on ideas, hit me up at [email protected]. We're always open. And with that route I'll see you next time.

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